Amazon Sells Gift Cards to Lots of Other Stores!

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You can buy just about anything on Amazon, including gift cards to other sites.

This is very helpful if you’re trying to max out the $1,500 category bonus on the Chase Freedom for shopping at Amazon this quarter. You get 5X points for up to $1,500 in purchases or 7,500 Ultimate Rewards Points or $75 in cash back for using your Chase Freedom at Amazon this quarter.

You can then add the gift card balance to your Amazon account and use it whenever you want because the balance in your Amazon account never expires.

Note that you CANNOT use your gift card balance to buy more Amazon gift cards to OTHER gift cards. So you’re out of luck if you later decide that you want to use your Amazon gift card balance to buy a gift card to, say, Applebees’s.

Amazon sells Gift Cards to Other Stores!

Buying gift cards to other stores from Amazon is an easy way to maximize the Chase Freedom 4th quarter bonus. You can give these as gifts or keep them for yourself. And you don’t pay shipping when you order them on Amazon.

4. Department Stores

A. Kohls

But if you’ve already maxed out your annual 5X Ultimate Rewards points at office supply stores when using your Chase Ink Plus or Chase Ink Bold , you can buy Kohl’s gift cards on Amazon when you get 5X points with the Chase Freedom.

Bottom Line

You can use this to get 5X points on your Chase Freedom because Amazon is included in the 5X category bonus until December 31, 2013. But don’t forget that you may be able to buy gift cards to stores for less by visiting sites which trade gift cards such as Gift Card Granny.

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17 responses to “Amazon Sells Gift Cards to Lots of Other Stores!”

During the Amex Sync promotion, buy $75 get $25 credit, we accumulated multiple $75 gc’s. With every 75gc, we get a 50GC for Petco and a 25 GC for entertainment. This for restaurant and movies. We like to think of it as going out each week with Amex paying for it!

So what you’re saying is that we can use the $75 credit to buy Amazon gift cards (or other retail gift cards), but these gift cards can NOT be used to buy other gift cards, like Kohls or Starbucks. Right?

Be realistic about all of this. True spending $1,500 in 3 months will get you back $75 in cash because of the Freedom Bonus. But do you honestly trust yourself enough NOT to spend $75 more than you would have had you not got the gift cards in the first place? Once you get that gift card(s), very few of us instinctively still consider it cash. Case in point. We go to California Pizza Kitchen maybe once every couple of months when paying with cash. When we buy gift cards to save say 5%, we do not go to CPK twice a month. We’ll see that GC in our wallet, and go, oh yeah, let’s go to CPK again even though it’s been only a week or two. There goes another $50 down the drain. And I would never give my wife 3 or 4 gift cards, tell her, “only use these when you would have used cash instead in those stores” and then expect her to follow suit. It’s human nature to use gift cards faster than you would have if you used cash. You’ll spend more, the $75 bonus is wasted way before you finish using those $1,500 in gift cards. I buy Amazon gift cards only because I’m less likely to overspend than say using a restaurant gift card, but it still is way too easy when you see $600 sitting in your Amazon account saying “you can afford it!”. Anyway be careful unless you are a God of Discipline. It’s way to easy to spend $1.01 to save $1.00. Sorry for the downer.

I was just wondering how else to maximize the 5% quarter cashback. Is there any other way we can buy prepaid gift cards this quarter? Department stores do not carry them at all……and collecting restaurant and gas cards are not useful for me. Please advise.

@JohnnieD – LOL! AMEX has been good to us with the Small Business Saturday and sync promotions.

@Nancy – You can’t buy store gift cards from Amazon using an Amazon gift card. So if you eventually want to buy a store gift card from Amazon, you’re better off buying it directly from Amazon, and not buying an Amazon branded gift card in the hopes of using it to buy a store gif card later on.

@Amy – Thanks! I’ve never been to a Peiwei yet.

@Kent C – That’s a very valid point. Research shows that folks tend to spend more with a credit card than with cash. But you shouldn’t be in this hobby if you spend more on a credit card than you would with cash. The same applies with gift cards – you shouldn’t spend more just because you have the gift card.

@goodtoknow – I haven’t investigated each store for which Amazon sells gift cards. But there could be a store which sells prepaid Visa or MasterCard cards in their physical store and which accepts a gift card as payment.

While we’re using the Chase for some of our shopping, and the cash back goes toward our next vacation, I’ve really been maximizing the use of the American Airline shopping portal. For just $250 in purchases through the portal, I have gotten an extra 3,000 miles. And, if you take care where to shop, the underlying miles/$ can be significant. DIL wanted a subscription to Bon Apetit, and magazines.com, which has competitive prices for subscriptions, is offering 20 miles/$, making the subscription alone worth an extra 600 miles.

Of course, we have the $25 for $75 at amazon on our Amexes!

But I really am not a fan of feeding the amazon juggernaut, if I can get an equivalent deal, elsewhere.

Was wondering how the Freedom card works, do you have a choice as to receive Ultimate rewards points, or Cash back. I have not been signing up for this card because I thought it was just a cash back card and I am looking to fly. It says at the beginning of your article about the 7500 UR points? Thanks

@scott – The Freedom card is marketed as a cash back card, but you actually get Ultimate Rewards points. So the $200 sign-up bonus is actually 20,000 Ultimate Rewards points. You can transfer those points to other Ultimate Rewards cards such as the Chase Sapphire Preferred, Ink Bold or Ink Plus and from there to hotels and airlines.

What are the fees for these merchant gift cards on Amazon.com? It seems like one great way to take advantage of this is to buy Staples gift cards on Amazon.com, using either a Chase Freedom or an Amex card. Then when the Staples gift cards arrive in the mail, go through Shop Discover or Upromise and use the Staples gift cards to buy Visa gift cards. Assuming the merchant gift cards on Amazon.com have no fee, and you buy $1500 worth of Staples gift cards this way, you would earn 7500 Ultimate Rewards points, pay $105 in fees, and get $75 cash back for a net cost of $30. If using an Amex gift card (and assuming no fee for these merchant gift cards), then for each offer of $25 off $75 on Amazon purchases, you would earn 100 miles or points, pay $7 in fees, and get $25 back for $18 in profit.

You can get better deals for some of these restaurants (Panera, Einstein, Pei Wei / PF Changs, etc.) by buying GCs directly from them during the holiday bonus period. Panera offers a 10% bonus gift card, Pei Wei gives you a free small entree with $25 (~20% bonus), PF Chang’s gives you a 20% bonus on $100 GC. Some of the bonus cards have time limits, but they are all reasonable if these are restaurants you go to on a regular basis. Definitely better than 5% back from Chase — save that for the stores that don’t offer a holiday bonus.

You can also get a 20% bonus gift card with Outback through Dec 31. And there are several other restaurants in the Outback chain where you can use the gift and bonus cards. (Bonus cards must be used by Feb. 10.)

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